MEO's may have been bought by the billionaire businessman Patrick Drahi, but the company is still up to its old tricks, as witnesses in an August promotional campaign that is totally illegal.
MEO is offering Internet capacity for free to customers during August, but obliges them to pay for the service after that date if they do not phone a special number hidden at the end of an unsolicited SMS message.
According to Ana Sofia Ferreira, from the consumer protection association DECO, dozens of complaints already have been received about the SMS message that MEO is sending out to customers to announce that it has given them "two Gigabytes (2GB) of internet until August 31st and that after that date customers can keep this extra internet level for just €3.98 per month."
At the end of the SMS message, MEO states that if the customer "prefers not to benefit from these advantages" they should call "free to 800200023."
According to DECO, this is totally illegal as it is not up to customers to cancel an unsolicited service.
Ana Sofia Ferreira explained that the law clearly prohibits operators from charging for any unsolicited service, that the absence of a consumer response does not count as consent, and MEO can not, from August 31st, charge €3.98 for a service that customers have not asked for.
DECO already has sent a complaint to the telecommunications regulator, ANACOM, and wants MEO to be fined and to stop its August promotion immediately.
MEO customers who have tried to cancel the service by phoning the special number have been thwarted by an automated answering service that issues confusing instructions as to cancellation procedures, leaving customers unsure as whether they had been successful or not.
The MEO brand is disappearing next year as Altice scraps both MEO and PT, branding both, ‘Altice’ which at least has no associated image problems - yet.